Roots of Murder (11 page)

“What I need to know right now is should I pull my students out or keep going?” Ellen asked. “If you stay”—this was to Deputy Johnston—“then I'm inclined to see if we can get this skeleton out of the ground.”

Kate's cell phone rang. “Hello,” she answered as she stepped away from them.

“Keep digging, ma'am,” Deputy Johnston told Ellen. “Soon as I can I'll call the sheriff and see if he can wrangle loose another man for out here.”

“Nell,” Kate said. “It's your daughter, Lizzie.”

“Lizzie? How did she get your cell number?” Nell asked as she took the phone. “Lizzie, what's going on?” This was probably an “I need a ride” call, which happened more than Nell thought it should.

“Mom?”

“Yes, what's going on?” Nell asked again. She almost said “if you need a ride, too bad, it's a long wait or a long walk,” but decided she didn't want her onlookers to know she had that derelict of a daughter.

“Mom, I'm okay. It's Josh.”

“Josh! What's wrong?!”

“Yeah, that's right, worry about him and not me,” Lizzie said, commenting on Nell's dramatic change of tone.

“I'm talking to you, so you're obviously okay,” Nell replied.

“Right. For all you know I could be on my death bed and these would be my last words on this earth.”

“Lizzie,” Nell said, cursing the timing of her daughter's adolescent mood. “What happened to Josh?”

“He's okay. Maybe just a broken arm.”

Nell didn't consider that okay. “What happened?”

“Some jerk threw a stick into his bike wheel. Good thing he was actually wearing his helmet.”

“Where is Josh now?”

“Here at the ER. They're doing an
x-ray
. Do I have to call Grandmom?”

Nell debated, then chose what suited her. “No, you don't need to call your grandmother. I'm on my way. Can I talk to Josh?”

“He's getting an
x-ray
right now,” Lizzie pointed out, winning Nell a few more
stupid-mother
-
who-wasn
'
t-listening
points. “I talked to him before he went in. He told me to call Kate's cell to get to you.”

Her children were alive. She could get the rest of the story in person and not use up more of Kate's minutes. “All right. Please be someplace where I can find you. I should be there in about twenty minutes or so.”

“See you, Mom. Be careful. The guys that threw the stick yelled at Josh to tell his mother to back off.”

“What?” Nell said, but the phone faltered and they were cut off. “Lizzie!” she yelled, but the call was lost. I'll ask when I get there, she told herself.

“Thanks.” Nell handed the phone back to Kate. “Josh had a bike wreck and may have broken his arm.”

There were murmurs all around hoping that he would be okay. Both Kate and Ellen promised to update Nell of anything that happened at the site.

Nell hurried down the trail, breaking into a run in the less overgrown parts.

“Goddamn them!” she cursed as she started her car. Josh could have been killed. Her anger boiled until she had to tell herself out loud to calm down or at least not let her anger affect her driving.

By the time she got to the ER, Nell was calm enough to marginally pay attention to parking in a legal spot, far enough from the entrance to cause her to run. She wasn't sure if it was worry about Josh or a way of getting rid of the
still-searing
anger. Thom is dead, you bastards, she thought as she pounded across the pavement, and now you want Josh. Bastards, bastards, fucking bastards.

“Be careful, you don't want to trip,” someone in scrubs called to her as she ran up the steps. An ambulance was in the bay and two wheelchairs were passing on the ramp, one entering, one leaving. Nell hurried in front of the entering one.

Approaching the desk, her breathing heavy from the run, she said, “I'm looking for my son, Joshua McGraw.”

As the woman flipped through papers, maddeningly reducing Josh to a name on a sheet of paper, Nell scanned the waiting room for Lizzie. She'd better be with Josh, Nell fumed, as the woman turned another page and slowly scanned it.

Another sheet was thoroughly scanned and Nell was about to start yelling when she spotted Lizzie coming down the hallway, her hand in a bag of chips, a soda tucked in the crook of her arm.

“Lizzie!” Nell called, ignoring the scanning woman. “Where's Josh?”

“Mom? You got here fast.”

“I told you to wait where I could see you, damn it! Did you think the candy machine was the best place?”

“I was only gone a minute.”

“You knew I was on my way. Couldn't the minute have waited?” Nell demanded.

With an angry gesture, Lizzie suddenly threw her chips and the still unopened can of soda into a trash can. “There! I'm sorry; I didn't know I should be your handmaid waiting every second for you! Making sure Josh was okay and getting him here isn't enough. God forbid I get hungry!” Lizzie ended her speech close to a wail. Nell felt ashamed as she watched tears on her daughter's face.

She has to be as scared as I am, Nell thought. Thom is just as dead for her as he is for me. Lizzie handled her raw emotions with the inexperience of a teenager.

She reached for her daughter, but Lizzie spun away.

“I'm so sorry,” Nell said softly. “I … I guess sorry isn't quite enough.”

Lizzie still kept her head turned away, hastily wiping the tears away.

Nell continued. “I'm sorry. I was worried about Josh and I … oh, fuck. You didn't hear that.” Lizzie glanced her way. “I'm not doing a good job here. You did the right thing; you got Josh here and made sure he was going to be okay. And, well, what else is there to do while waiting around in a hospital? It's not reasonable you'd do homework.”

“I'm worried about Josh,” Lizzie said in a voice cracked by tears. “About you, too. I wondered if something had happened when I couldn't get you at the newspaper or home.”

The
tear-stained
words cut into Nell. Even if I were a perfect mother, she thought, I couldn't make up for the hurt and fear that's come into their lives. “Please, honey, I messed up, okay? Can you forgive me?”

“Okay, this time,” Lizzie said, but Nell recognized the armor for what it was, a thin layer of tinfoil. The same flimsy protection she'd worn when she was an adolescent.

Nell reached for her again and Lizzie didn't pull away, instead wrapping her arms around Nell with a fervor that belied her cool words. They held the embrace, and then Lizzie said, “Did you really say ‘fuck'?”

Nell kept her arm around her daughter's shoulder and her face close to Lizzie's. “Yes, I did. You now know the truth. I know those words. But that doesn't mean you can say them, particularly if there is a chance your grandmother might find out. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Let's go find Josh,” Nell said.

“Okay. But can I get my drink out of the trash? I'm thirsty.”

“No, you can't get it out of the trash. But you can certainly get another one. I've got change in my purse. Can we see if Josh wants something, or are you dying of thirst now?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess it wouldn't be polite of me to munch and slurp in front of him.”

The woman finally finished scanning her pages. “He should be in the third slot on your left.”

Josh indeed was, looking lost and pale against the white hospital sheets.

“Mom,” he said weakly. “I'm going to be okay. Arm's not broke.”

A doctor entered, carrying
x-rays
with her. “Nope, the arm's not broken. Good thing you were wearing a helmet. You're going to be a little bruised and have some ugly scabs for a while, but nothing's going to follow you into old age.”

“He's all right?” Nell asked. She wanted to hear it again.

“He'll be fine. You're his mother?” the doctor asked.

“Thank God,” Nell said, then answered the question. “Yes, I am.”

“He can go home soon. It won't hurt him to just lie still for a while. He's probably going to be sore for a few days. Any sharp pain, anything that seems odd, come right back in. I'm not going to write a prescription for pain meds; the
over-the
-counter stuff should do. No aspirin, of course. Take it easy for a few days and keep wearing that helmet.” With that, the doctor exited the cubicle.

“How are you feeling?” Nell asked Josh.

“I'm okay. A little sore, I guess.”

Nell looked her son over. He had a scrape on his chin; the helmet hadn't protected him there. His left elbow looked like raw meat. His legs were still covered by the sheet. “Can you tell me what happened?” she asked.

Lizzie and Josh exchanged a glance, as if trying to decide how much to tell—and worry—Mom.

“I must have hit a pothole,” Josh said.

“It's too late,” Lizzie interjected. “I already told her about the guys throwing the stick in your spokes.” She added defensively, “I had to let her know. They might have come after her next.”

They're protecting me and worrying about me, Nell thought. She wondered how she could return her children to their interrupted childhood. Or if there was even a way.

“Tell me what happened. We're going to have to go to the police with this,” Nell added.

Again they exchanged a look. Nell thought about demanding they tell her what they were hiding. But that could wait; she would give them a chance to tell her on their own, without heavy mother
strong-arm
tactics.

“We were going home from school. Josh was riding his bike and I was a little behind him,” Lizzie said.

Nell was attuned enough to her children to see the gap of information. Lizzie, walking, would have been left quickly behind by Josh on the bike. Still, she didn't interrupt.

“And this red truck comes zooming around and pulls up even with Josh's bike. Some guy hollers out, ‘You Josh McGraw?' Josh, dumb bunny, answers, ‘Why, yes, I am.'”

Nell suspected that Josh didn't really say that; Lizzie often made fun of the way he talked like his parents while she was taking on the speech of her peers.

Josh protested. “I just said, yeah.”

“So they yell out, ‘Tell your mother this is from us,' and they shove a broom handle into his wheel. Josh goes head over heels into the air. And we ended up here,” Lizzie finished.

Nell decided it was time to ask a few mother questions. “What else can you tell me about the truck?”

“It was red, sort of new,” Josh said.

“Bunch of junk in the back,” Lizzie added. “Boards and paint, like they did that kind of stuff.”

“What about the people in the truck?”

“It happened so fast, I didn't really see them,” Josh said in an abashed voice, as if he'd failed miserably by not being a hero, or at least not getting a good look at the bad guys.

“Men or women?”

“Men, of course,” Lizzie said.

“Young? Old?”

“Not young,” Lizzie said. That could be anyone over
twenty-five
, Nell thought. “But not real old either.”

“White?”

“Yeah. Brown scraggily hair on the one who threw the stick, and he wore a sort of dirty baseball cap,” Josh offered.

That sounded like the Jones brothers to Nell. She decided the rest of the questions about the attackers could wait until they talked to the police.

“Just how did you get here?” she asked.

Lizzie jumped in. “Well, Billy Naquin just happened to drive up on his motorcycle and he had a cell phone.”

That supplied the missing information. Nell was more than sure that Billy didn't just happen upon the scene, but Lizzie had been catching a forbidden ride on the back of his bike.

“So he called the ambulance. I tried to call you at work and at home. Then the ambulance showed up, and we came here and then Josh suggested I call you on Kate's cell phone. And that's the story.”

Not quite. “How did you manage to keep up with Josh on his bicycle?” Nell asked directly. She had to admit that in this instance, Lizzie being on a motorcycle behind Josh had been useful, but it was still too large an infraction to go unnoticed.

“Um … I was walking. Some of us decided to walk for a ways.”

“Walking? How were you able to keep up with Josh on a bike?”

“Well, uh, we started before he did, so he just happened to be passing us when it all happened.”

“Ah, I see. You just happened to be in the same place where the hooligans attacked Josh. And it just so happened that Billy Naquin came riding up on his motorcycle at that same moment.”

“Well … yeah.”

“I would be very disappointed if I were to find out you had been riding a motorcycle, something both I and your father have forbidden.” Nell didn't add “and with a grunge kid three years older like Billy Naquin.” She knew that might only serve to drive Lizzie into the
time-honored
teenage rebellion of dating someone her parents hated. “There are a few gaps in your story that make me suspicious,” she continued, “but right now the important thing is that you and Josh are okay. This one time you get away with it. Next time it's three months detention.”

Lizzie didn't protest, which was the final proof that she'd been on the back of the motorcycle.

“Can we go home now?” Josh asked.

“Soon,” Nell said. “Lizzie, why don't you get whatever from the vending machines while I go do the paperwork that's required to get us out of here.” She dug in her purse and gave Lizzie a handful of change and some single bills.

She left them with Lizzie reciting the possibilities from the drink and snack machines. Like the mercurial adolescent she was, Lizzie was now poised and mature, cheerfully taking care of her younger brother. Nell was abashed that it had taken only an apology and a candy bar to work her way back into her daughter's good graces. Vaguely she wondered if this was the kind of thing that would surface twenty years later in therapy.